DIY plans, videos, infographic, and info about the Walipini, an underground greenhouse that lets you grow year round. You can build it for less than $300!!

Homesteaders, farmers, and backyard gardeners often use various methods to extend the growing season, especially in colder climates.

They often use cold frames, hoop houses, black plastic, frost covers, and greenhouses to give their crops a boost or a head start for the coming growing season. They’re also used to hold off the fall frost for a few more days or sometimes weeks.

Greenhouses are the largest and most permanent of these structures. They are usually expensive to construct and require a lot of additional heat to extend the season much into the winter.

Hermine Ricketts and her husband Tom Carroll may grow fruit trees and flowers in the front yard of their Miami Shores house…

Vegetables, however, are not allowed.

Ricketts and Carroll thought they were gardeners when they grew tomatoes, beets, scallions, spinach, kale and multiple varieties of Asian cabbage. But according to a village ordinance that restricts edible plants to backyards only, they were actually criminals.

“That’s what government does – interferes in people’s lives,” Ricketts said. “We had that garden for 17 years. We ate fresh meals every day from that garden. Since the village stepped its big foot in it, they have ruined our garden and my health.”

Florida may be known for its tropical climate and spicy Latin-American culture, but what it’s not known for is the freedom to garden. The southeastern state continues to make headlines over the state government’s contempt for front yard gardens.

Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts had been cultivating their garden for 17 years when their hometown, Miami Shores, passed a new ordinance restricting vegetable growing to the backyard. The couple begrudgingly dug up their lush garden in August 2013, after local officials threatened them with a daily fine of $50, according to reporting by Fox News.

Miami, FL — Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts recently had a run-in with the law and were threatened with daily fines for their illegal activity. Carroll and Ricketts weren’t robbing banks, or trafficking humans, or running some other criminal enterprise — they were growing their own food.

That’s right. For 17 years, the couple grew their own food in their front yard until one day, the state came knocking. They were threatened with a fine of $50 every single day they let the garden grow in their yard.

Not wanting to be extorted or kidnapped and thrown in a cage, the couple immediately complied and dug up their garden. However, now they are fighting back in the form of a lawsuit.

One of the best ways to protect your children from a lifetime of allergies and autoimmune disorders is to make sure that they – and you – spend plenty of time outdoors getting dirty, scientists are now saying.

That’s because exposure to the naturally occurring microbes in our outdoor environment helps program the developing immune system to learn what types of foreign agents are actually harmless. This prevents it from later attacking innocuous allergens, or even your own body.

“You want your immune system to have a large repertoire of harmless organisms that it has learned not to attack,” said medical microbiologist Graham Rook of University College London. “If you have this, then, because all lifeforms are ultimately built from the same building blocks, you are equipped to recognise almost anything that comes along and mount an appropriate immune response,” he continued, as reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

As the gardener savors the last of the autumn harvest, collecting seeds for next year’s garden should be a priority as well. Seeds can typically be collected and stored for one year while maintaining high levels of germination. Under ideal conditions, many seeds can be stored for much longer. Moisture, light and temperature are all important factors to consider when storing seeds.

Choose open-pollinated seeds

Seeds from hybridized plants will typically not develop into plants that are true to form. When a plant is cross-pollinated, it may take on characteristics from both parent plants, and desirable aspects of the hybridized plant may be lost. The gardener should save only open-pollinated varieties of seed, which are also known as heirloom varieties. Open-pollinated varieties of seed will stay true to form, despite different types of pollination.

Vibrantly colored leaves falling from the trees, blanketing the ground in deep red, orange and yellow hues, accompanied by cool breezy nights and porches laden with pumpkins, remind us that autumn is here. For many, it’s a season filled with heartfelt moments centered around holidays, family get-togethers and delicious, home-cooked meals.

However, while cooking your Thanksgiving pumpkin pies, you might notice some uninvited guests in your kitchen. Just because the weather’s changing doesn’t mean pesky insects have disappeared, in fact, ants often head inside homes before the winter hits, seeking shelter to forage during the cold months.

Admittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too.

Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds.

If you’d visited a few months ago, you’d have found them overflowing with curly kale, carrot plants, lettuces, spring onions — all manner of vegetables and salad leaves.

Today the beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up to the police station forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. And what are the cops doing about this brazen theft from right under their noses?

In New York City, farming on a rooftop is not just an idea. Brooklyn Grange farms more than two and a half acres of rooftops in Brooklyn and Queens, and then sells what it produces to New Yorkers. A special soil mixture is used to minimize weight on the roofs and allow rapid drainage during heavy downpours. The farmed rooftops also house chickens and an apiary.

My country grows stranger by the day. The elderly Italian lady who lives next door to me annotates her almanac to keep track of which moon phases bode best for planting, thinning, or harvesting fresh back yard arugula. Suspicious ways? She’s definitely attempting to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning. If the taste of the fresh, shared greens she drops off on my doorstep in brown paper bags are any proof — it’s working.

The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs “to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning.” It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways. “The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning,” the FBI wrote.